A Star Shall Fall (18 page)

“I,” Irrith said, and stopped. “Um. That is—”

A grin lurked at the corner of his mouth. “It was something you said to get past Edward.” Irrith looked down in embarrassment. “It’s all right; my time isn’t so precious as he thinks. What did you want?”

She felt very odd, sitting in this light and delicate room. It didn’t feel like the Onyx Hall at all—more like some fashionable gentleman’s parlor, that happened to have no windows. A little piece of the mortal world, brought down here intact. “You’re mortal,” Irrith said.

The grin came back, lurking more obviously. “I am,” Galen agreed.

“And you’re a part of the Onyx Court. The Prince, even. So you must believe this place is worthwhile. Right?”

It didn’t quite kill the grin, but Galen’s eyebrows rose. “Of course I do.”

“Why?”

He stared at her, lips slightly parted. Watching the play of emotions across his face was entrancing. Galen had a very expressive face, wide-eyed, with a sensitive mouth and skin that easily betrayed a blush. And his mood changed so quickly, so easily! She could observe him for a week without pause and never grow bored.

That sensitive mouth opened and closed a couple of times, as Galen searched for words. At last he said, “Her Grace told me you fought for the Onyx Hall during the Great Fire. Did you not think it worth preserving then?”

“I did.”

“Have you changed your mind?”

Irrith squirmed on the padded seat. “I . . . don’t know. It just seems to me—like we, the fae,
cling
to you. To mortals. Because you give us things, feelings, experiences, that we can’t get otherwise. But what do
you
get in return? Oh, sometimes we inspire the occasional artist—but is a painting or a piece of music that important? And sometimes a mortal falls in love with a faerie, but how often does that turn out well for them?”

Irrith damned her thoughtless tongue even as the words came out, too late to be stopped. Galen flushed a fascinating, fragile pink. Did he really believe no one in the Onyx Hall knew of his unrequited love, when his every mannerism shouted it to the world?

Out of pity for his discomfort, Irrith said, “I agree with the Queen, as far as it goes. I like the idea of mortals and fae having some kind of harmony . . .” She sighed. “Even in the Vale, we’re drifting apart. People are more concerned with London newspapers, the latest fashion or gossip about the aristocracy, the next ball or concert or whatever gathering is planned. It doesn’t touch Wayland’s realm, of course; we’re perfectly safe inside. But fae are going out less and less. And if we don’t go out, then what’s the point of being there at all? Why not just go into Faerie?” Or to France. Like Carline.

“Because we need you,” Galen said.

“Do you? Why?”

He sighed and ran his hands over his scalp again. One of his fingernails was bitten down to the quick. “I don’t know if I can explain it.”

If he couldn’t, then who could? “You’re Prince of the Stone,” Irrith reminded him. “The mortal half of the Onyx Court’s rulership. You of all people should have an answer.”

The compression of his mouth, the shift in his eyes, illustrated a welter of emotions. Embarrassment, nervousness, frustration. Irrith had clearly reminded him of something he knew, and tried not to think of.
He’s a very odd Prince,
she thought; she had seen enough to compare.
And it isn’t just him being new, either.

Galen said, seemingly out of nowhere, “There is such beauty here—and such ugliness, too.”

Magrat’s face suggested itself. “And that’s somehow good for mortals?”

“In a way.” He rose from the table, hands half-raised, cradling empty air as if trying to grasp the idea in his mind. “Whatever a faerie is—beautiful or ugly; friendly or cruel; amusing or appallingly rude—you’re
pure
. They say evil exists in the world because without it, good would have no meaning. I wonder sometimes if that’s what the fae are. Not evil—I don’t mean that—” Galen’s half-distracted words stuttered into apology, before he saw Irrith hadn’t taken offense. “More like the, the pigments a painter works with. The pure colors, before they’re blended. When you hate, you
hate
. When you love—”

“We love forever.” Or at least Lune did. Irrith had never given her heart, and had no intention of ever doing so. “But how does that help
London
?”

“How does water help, or air, or the downward pull of gravity? Those things simply
are,
and without them, there is no London.”

Irrith shook her head impatiently, hopping off her own chair. “There
was
a London, though, before there was an Onyx Court. It hasn’t always been here, you know. I never saw the city until a hundred years ago, but I can’t imagine it was somehow less
real,
less full of life, back when they didn’t have a bunch of mischievous, meddlesome faeries being friendly and ugly and all the rest of it beneath their feet.”

“A hundred years,” Galen said, on a breath of startled laughter. “The charms and enchantments, you know—those I can accept, without much trouble. It’s the immortality my mind can’t encompass. You don’t look a hundred years old.”

She was far older than that. She suspected, though, that Galen didn’t need to hear her talk about the Black Death, or any of the other fragments she remembered from humanity’s long-distant past. Instead she went back to the original point. “What would happen, if we all left? Not just London—all of Wayland’s court, and Herne’s, and every other faerie realm in England. No more faeries. What would you lose?”

Galen looked as if the mere thought was enough to break him into splinters. “I—”

He would lose Lune. A more thoughtless young man might have said it; Irrith had known many mortals who scarcely past their own desires. Galen, for all his youth and uncertainty, had a larger heart than that. But
why
? It frustrated her, that she could not understand. What made him care so much about the fae?

At some point his hands had curled into helpless fists; now they relaxed, one joint at a time. Galen’s eyes—nearly the same blue as the walls—were unfocused, gazing off into the distance, and in them was a well of feeling deep enough for Irrith to drown in. Then he blinked, and so did she; the spell was broken. Galen said ruefully, “You want a single answer, one thing I can name that will account for all the fae at once. I don’t know if it’s that simple—if it
can
be that simple. The good comes in many diverse ways. Some of it is grand, like the saving of England from the Spanish Armada; some of it is slight, like the rescue of a single child from starvation in a gutter. If I must name a single thing . . .” He turned to her, and the longing in his eyes made Irrith shiver down to her toes. “You are our bridge to Faerie. If you leave, then it goes beyond our reach. And that would be a terrible loss.”

He believed it. He really did. Irrith was used to fae hungering for the brightness of mortals, but to see that hunger reflected back in his eyes . . .

“I’m not leaving.”

Her own voice, speaking without instructions. But the words, Irrith realized, were true. She repeated them. “I’m not leaving. Others probably will, because it’s easier than fighting. But I’ll stay. If nothing else, London deserves this much good of us: that we mend the things we broke.”

That sounded good. And it was easier than saying the other thing in her mind, the one called forth by Galen’s eyes.
I cannot refuse you.

Odd as it was, a mortal wanted something from her—and she wanted to give it, if she could.

Galen caught up her hand and kissed it, then gripped her fingers as if holding fast to a rope. “Thank you, Dame Irrith.”

Common words, a courtesy tossed back and forth a thousand times a day. But the words, and the touch of his hands, stayed with her long after she departed.

PART THREE

Fermentatio

Spring 1758

I court others in Verse, but I love Thee in Prose; And They have my Whimsies, but Thou hast my Heart.

—Matthew Prior,
“A Better Answer to Cloe Jealous”

In certain lights, there might almost be a face within the dark mass. A long snout here; two indentations there, that might be eyes, set predatorlike in the dust and ice.

Hunger stirs within the dream. The sun’s radiance is warming the comet: heat, light,
fire.
Things the sleeper remembers. Like calls to like, and it is kindred to the sun, a wayward child sent farther than it was ever meant to go. There is nothing to burn, out here in the black; even the strongest spirit is vanquished by this absolute cold. They crafted better than they knew, those enemies, those jailers, when they banished their foe; this prison is a torture beyond any it has ever known.

But release is coming. Heat, light,
fire.
Things the sleeper remembers.

Things it will know again, and soon.

The Onyx Hall, London: April 2, 1758

Niklas von das Ticken glared at Irrith as she came through the pillars into the antechamber of the Calendar Room. She could never tell whether he hated her particularly, or whether he turned that expression on the world as a whole. Even his conversations with his brother sounded like arguments—though admittedly,
everything
sounded like an argument in German. Either way, the red-bearded dwarf soon turned his scowl back to the half-built contraption on his worktable, ignoring Irrith as if she weren’t there.

That suited her just fine. Wilhas was far more pleasant to talk to anyway. “What’s he building, a birdcage?” Irrith asked, not caring if the other dwarf overheard.

“
Drachenkäfig
. A Dragon-cage,” Wilhas said. His fierce and bloodthirsty grin faded a moment later. “That is the idea. So far, though . . .”

“It doesn’t work.” Irrith didn’t ask why he wasn’t working on it inside the Calendar Room. She’d made that mistake precisely once, and gotten as her reward a half-hour diatribe from Niklas—she’d timed it by the assorted clocks—all throat-hacking consonants and spittle, the gist of which was that the chamber’s time out of time was only useful if you didn’t need to keep coming out to fetch things or question someone or test your results. And apparently that happened often.

Someone was in the Calendar Room right now, to judge by the closed door. Or more than one someone, perhaps. Wilhas talked endlessly about
Körpertage,
which Irrith didn’t fully understand; it had something to do with each person inside using up one day for every day the group remained in the room—but the sum of the collected time was great enough that no one other than Wilhas was overly concerned about how many they might be using.

If they didn’t find a solution, they’d never get a chance to use the remaining days anyway.

Irrith gave the Dragon-cage a dubious look. So far it was little more than a haphazard assortment of metal strips, like a barrel that had sprung all its staves, then lost about two-thirds of them. Whatever metal Niklas was using, it didn’t seem like much of a prison.

“That isn’t iron, is it?” she asked. Ktistes had made a passing comment about the dwarves trying to find a way to forge iron so it wouldn’t bother fae, but so far as she knew, nothing had come of it.

Wilhas shook his head, and she breathed a little more easily. Iron would seem like the logical choice; after all, the Dragon was just a kind of salamander—a really, really overgrown salamander—and therefore a creature of faerie-kind. But the box Lune had imprisoned the beast in at the end of the Great Fire had been solid iron, and that only worked for a little while. The Dragon’s power was just too great to be confined so easily.

Still, the box had given them ten years of peace, and its weakening structure held together for another six, until they hit upon the idea of exiling the Dragon to a comet. If Niklas could achieve half that result, it would still be more than they had now.

She hopped up onto the edge of Wilhas’s table, and got a scowl like his brother’s as he moved various tools to safety. The dwarves fascinated her almost as much as mortals did. They’d come to England when the crown passed to a German cousin, George I, and as near as Irrith could tell, they considered Lune the counterpart of the Georges: Queen over all of faerie Britain. So long as they didn’t say that where any of faerie Britain’s other monarchs could hear—or their ambassadors—Irrith supposed it didn’t hurt. At least it meant they worked hard on Lune’s behalf.

On various things, some more plausible than others. “What do you think?” Irrith asked.

“Of vat? Of my brother’s cage?” Wilhas shrugged, which was probably a wise move when Niklas was standing right there. Not listening, or at least not appearing to, but Irrith had already broken up more fistfights between them than she wanted to.

“Of the current plans,” Irrith said. “Or lack of same.”

The blond dwarf fiddled with a mirror, mouth twisted into a grimace. “There are plans. Many plans. Keep the
Drache
on its little star; trap it ven it comes down; kill it if ve can. Any of those vould be good,
ja?
If ve can make them vork.”